What Salesforce Configuration For Distributors Is Really Like

If your company is considering Salesforce, you’re probably spending a lot of time looking at specific features and trying to gauge what the user experience will be like for your sales team.

One aspect you probably haven’t thought as much about is Salesforce configuration.

For distributors, managing relationships and data across ship-to locations, bill-to accounts and vendors can be challenging within Salesforce’s all-purpose customer relationship management (CRM) software. Setting up Salesforce to meet the specific needs of the distribution business model might not be possible, so your team may need to pay for Salesforce customization to add features that aren’t standard, which can involve extensive consulting, development, and ongoing maintenance costs.

In this post, we’ll break down the steps required in Salesforce configuration or Salesforce customization and explain why White Cup CRM eliminates these hassles so your team can achieve faster returns.

Salesforce Configuration vs. Customization

While there is no standard Salesforce configuration, the process of configuring their CRM for your business involves setting up the system to support your business processes. This includes:

Adding users and permissions and updating security settings
Creating user-defined values and fields your team can easily understand
Building the right reports or dashboards
Setting up email templates
Creating custom objects
Setting up workflows that make sense for your team’s processes

Salesforce customization is more complex. You might need to take additional steps to add features, change the Salesforce UI or page layout, build custom integrations with other software like your ERP, BI, and eCommerce platforms, or use custom code to change the user interface.

Unless you have an in-house Salesforce administrator with development expertise, you will likely need to hire a consultant and someone certified to use the Salesforce App Builder.

It can take months to optimize Salesforce for your organization, depending on the complexity of your needs and in the meantime, you’re paying monthly subscription fees for software your team is eager to use but can’t.

Configuring and Customizing Salesforce For Distribution

White Cup works with hundreds of customers in the distribution business, many of whom previously used Salesforce, including Callico Distributors. We understand the challenges that come with setting it up for this unique business model, including the frustrations of third party integrations and over- customization,making the platform so deeply engrained in your organization that it’s difficult to abandon even if it’s less than ideal.

Here are some of the steps distributors typically have to take before they can begin using Salesforce and how we’ve addressed them with our CRM platform.

1. Adjusting Layouts and Field Names for Distribution-Specific Needs

Salesforce’s default configuration is designed for broad use across industries. This means distributors must manually adjust record layouts, redefine field names, and establish relationships between accounts to reflect distribution-specific nuances like “ship-to” versus “bill-to” relationships. This takes time and can delay implementation.

White Cup CRM comes pre-configured with industry-specific field names and layouts tailored to distribution. For example, the system makes it easy to track and understand the relationships between “bill-to” and “ship-to” accounts.

2. Building Custom Reports

While Salesforce includes basic reporting, distributors who want to create meaningful custom reports typically have to purchase Tableau, which can cost at least $115 per user, per month. This makes it expensive to deploy across an enterprise. In G2 reviews, users also mention Tableau’s steep learning curve, data syncing issues and slow performance when handling large sets of data, and limited customization and formatting.

White Cup CRM always comes packaged with built-in business intelligence software – White Cup BI – to bring actionable insights to each member of your team, from your executives and operations leaders to sales managers and sales reps. This means your team has immediate access to:

Over 1,100 pre-built reports and 40 dashboards designed specifically for distributors.
Comprehensive customer scorecards that show sales, profitability, top products, open quotes and orders, invoices, and shipping histories for bill-to and ship-to accounts
Sales rep scorecards your managers can use to see each team member’s performance and coaching opportunities
Essential key performance indicators, including year-to-date sales compared to your company’s goals, profitability and inventory performance

These dashboards are already set up to display real-time data from your ERP and White Cup CRM, so you don’t need to hire a data analyst to build sales and product reports that include data from both systems.

3. ERP and eCommerce Integration

Integration between your ERP, CRM and eCommerce platform is essential in an era when customers buy from multiple channels. Giving your sales team insight into what products a customer is exploring or purchasing on your website drives conversations that can increase offline sales.

Unfortunately, many companies choose Salesforce because of its size and familiarity in the market, but they don’t realize how complicated and costly it is to integrate Salesforce with their ERP, eCommerce, and other systems. Without these integrations, they continue to have silos of customer, product, and inventory data, leading to discrepancies and duplicate data entry. This results in ineffective workflows, low user adoption, and a wasted investment.

While it’s possible to integrate Salesforce with ERP systems like Epicor, it’s an extensive process that typically requires hiring a consultant or purchasing a third-party solution.

Hiring a consultant can be challenging because as one data director put it, vendors are usually well-versed in one system, but not the other.

Even after they’ve done the integration work, there are frequent issues with real-time data synchronization, as one consultant acknowledged in its two-hour introductory webinar.

Resolving these issues and ensuring the integration remains up to date can require additional costs.

The same is true for integrating Salesforce with popular eCommerce platforms. The process is different for each one but requires using plugins or building a custom integration, mapping fields and synchronizing the data, and then testing and maintaining it. Companies may also need to consider adding security protocols, such as user authentication and data encryption for sensitive information.

White Cup CRM + BI offers seamless, native integration with common ERPs, including Epicor, Infor, and Oracle Netsuite. Because the White Cup team has deep expertise in using these systems, we use a systematic approach to these integrations during implementation, making the process fast and seamless.

White Cup also integrates with popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, Big Commerce, and WooCommerce. Sales reps can see customers’ eCommerce activity directly in White Cup CRM so they can follow up with a personal email or phone call to answer questions about a product someone recently added to their cart or send an email suggesting a related product.

Instead of relying on a team member to manage these integrations or hiring a developer to build one, your team gets immediate access to a complete sales engine with a single source of truth.

4. Developing Custom Workflows and Automation

Salesforce includes workflows to automate routine tasks like notifying an account owner of recent activity, seeking approval for a discount exceeding a certain amount, or sending an email.

However, some of the workflows will only be useful if you’ve taken the time to build a custom integration between Salesforce and your ERP to ensure you have the most recent product, pricing, and transactional information, the status of every quote, and the latest invoices.

Without this integration, you won’t have relevant, real-time data to make these workflows accurate or meaningful.

If you want to create customized workflows in Salesforce, you need to enlist the help of a development team. This could become an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Even Salesforce developers agree it’s becoming more difficult to work within the software; 53% agreed with this statement in a recent Salesforce Ben survey. The reasons for this include platform limitations, a steep learning curve, and “technical debt,” or the cost of needing to rework a solution because it was built using development shortcuts.

White Cup CRM + BI comes ready to be integrated with your ERP and eCommerce platform and is also pre-configured with AI-powered notifications and workflows tailored to distributors.

A few examples of these workflows include:

The ability to recommend related products based on AI-powered insights into a customer’s purchase history
AI-powered notifications that a customer may be ready to order, based on their buying cycle
AI-powered insights into slow-moving stock and the ability to create workflows to sell it to customers most likely to buy
The ability to trigger follow-up emails to customers who haven’t responded to a quote after a certain period of time
Assigning tasks for sales reps to follow up with customers who added items to their online cart and abandoned the purchase
Notifications to customers receiving late orders
Notifications to sales leaders when new accounts are created or when quotes exceed a certain dollar amount, and weekly emails notifying them about recent sales activity
Alerts to your customer service team when accounts are past due

White Cup CRM’s drag-and-drop workflow builder makes it easy to automate other processes without custom development, making it an efficient, cost-effective solution for distributors.

5. Testing and Deployment

Whether your team is configuring or customizing Salesforce, you will likely need to do this within a sandbox environment to test the updates and address any technical issues. This process can drag on for months.

Instead of approaching every implementation as if it’s a new project, White Cup has a standard CRM implementation process that accounts for your business goals and technical requirements. Within the first few weeks, we can establish the necessary data integrations and your team can begin testing the CRM and sharing their feedback.

6. Onboarding Users

There are entire consulting groups focused on “rescuing” companies from failed implementation, often due to low user adoption.

We built White Cup CRM + BI to be easy for anyone to use, eliminating many of the frustrations our team has heard about Salesforce over its 25-year history. One great example is the White Cup mobile sales app, designed to eliminate irrelevant features and make the essential elements easier to find.

With this app, your sales team can easily see their meetings and tasks for the day and see what customers are near their location so they can make the most of their time on the road.

They can see a full history of every customer at their fingertips, use voice recording to take notes during meetings and follow up in seconds.

Our flat-fee pricing also eliminates the per-user fees that keep many Salesforce users from accessing the system within their organization. When companies have to pay an additional monthly cost to add each new user, they often limit users to just the outside sales team. This limits collaboration from inside sales, marketing, customer service, and other essential team members.

White Cup is built to be essential for every customer-facing team member.

Built for Distribution And Faster Returns

Customizing Salesforce to meet the needs of distributors is a significant investment of time, money, and effort. White Cup CRM + BI is purpose-built for distribution and pre-configured with all the features and functionality you need, making it the obvious choice for distributors seeking a competitive edge without the headaches of endless customization.

White Cup is designed to serve as a complete sales engine and a single source of truth for your team, with built-in business intelligence, AI-powered features and ERP and eCommerce integrations from the moment you start using it. Our standardized implementation process gives your team a faster return on their investment, and flat-fee pricing makes it cost-effective for every customer-facing team member to use it.

Schedule a consultation to see how your team can simplify sales processes and accelerate your growth.